Health Coaching.

Health coaching to facilitate the promotion of healthy behavior and achievement of health-related goals

Coaching has become acceptable to both corporation and person to help improve performance, manage stress and achieve work and personal goals. Yet very few papers have been published with a specific focus on health and coaching.

This article highlights the possible role of coaching to facilitate the promotion of healthful behaviors and to help person achieve their health-related objectives.

Introduction to Health Coaching

The practice of personal, family, health, life, company, sports, performance and executive coaching has grown substantially since the early 1990s (Cockerill 2002, Fournies 2000, Neenan and Palmer 2001, Parsloe and Wray 2000, Peltier 2001).

Although the term “coach” has been borrowed as a metaphor from sport, it is now applied to the personal and work domains. Hence the term “coaching” has entered into the public psyche beyond the sports pages of the national newspapers and is becoming generally accepted as beneficial to its recipients.

It can even be seen as trendy having your own personal life coach. Whereas, in the United Kingdom, there’s still a stigma attached to seeing a counsellor or psychotherapist.

What’s health coaching?

There are many definitions of coaching. Four are summarized below -

1. Health coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is assisting them to learn rather than teaching them - a facilitation approach (Whitmore 1992, based on Gallwey, a tennis specialist).

2. Health coaching - Directly concerned with the immediate betterment of performance and development of skills by a form of tutoring or instruction - an instructional approach (Parsloe 1995).

3. Health coaching - the art of facilitating the performance, learning and development of another - a facilitation approach (Downey 1999).

Psychologists have developed another variation -  

4. Health coaching psychology is for enhancing wellness and performance in personal life and work domains with normal, non-clinical populations, underpinned by models of coaching grounded in established adult learning or psychological approaches (adapted Grant and Palmer 2002).

It can probably be assumed that these definitions ought to reflect the nature of coaching as practised by many practitioners.

Thus the key aspects of coaching, depending upon the model of coaching being applied, appear to include enhancing well-being, learning, facilitation, tutoring, instruction, development of skills and bettering performance. In addition, coaching is generally goal and solution focused (Grant 2001).

Health Coaching

Similar to health education experts, ordinarily the coach takes an active and directive role. Usually, the coach helps the coachee to achieve their goals by facilitating the learning process.

If “health coaching” or “coaching for health” is the focus, the coach might help to educate the coachee on specific health-related topics and subsequently support them in achieving

Health Coaching -  Practice Briefing

Health coaching to facilitate the promotion of healthful behavior and achievement of their health-related objectives. as the term coaching is becoming acceptable to the public, the concept of health coaching could be more favourably received by a client group contrarily to attending a health education lecture.

An established health-related expert body, the Institute of Wellness and Education, provides a definition of wellness and health education in their constitution -

The practice of wellness and health education might  be described as the organisation and execution of the influences affecting the environment, in addition to individual knowledge, attitudes and behavior, in matters concerning health for empowering communities and individuals to maintain and promote personal and community health and wellness, together with a proper acceptance and use of the health and medical services available. (IHPE 2002)

This definition doesn’t conflict with the general principles of the coaching approach, although its focus is on health and it can also be at the community level. This would be similar to stress or stress management coaching that is now available.

The International Stress Management Association (UK) has recognized the practice of this form of coaching for a number of years. It may be argued that stress management training and stress management coaching comes below the umbrella of the health education field.

Another professional body, the Association for Coaching (2003), includes both stress management coaching and health coaching on its website as “Speciality Coaching’.

Consequently the term “health coaching” is entering into citizens awareness, although not necessarily among mainstream health education or promotion professionals.

Within the field of health, papers have been published on behavioral counselling which has been used to educate customers with coronary heart illness (Steptoe et al 1999). Intriguingly, the counselling is active and directive in nature and takes an educational approach which can be more accurately described as instructional coaching.

A tentative definition of health coaching is given below -

Health coaching is the practice of health education and wellness within a coaching context, to enhance the well-being of person and to facilitate the achievement of their health-related goals.

This definition attempts to link health education and promotion to the key elements of coaching.

Psychological Blocks to Change

Due to the personal nature of coaching it could include tackling the health-related psychological blocks to change which could be challenged in the individual or group coaching session.

These cognitive or attitudinal blocks to change may be divided into Health Inhibiting Thinking (HITs) and Health Enhancing Thinking (HETs).* Cognitive techniques like Socratic questioning may be used to help a client to modify their thinking.

Health Coaching -  Final Thoughts

With the increasing interest in coaching, the introduction of “health coaching” or “coaching for health” may have an appeal across different generations.

Notwithstanding, there is a lack of published research that underpins the effectiveness of health coaching. Although many models of coaching exist (Bluckert 2003), the application of models to health coaching which take an educational approach, like cognitive-behavioral or multimodal, might provide promising results (Neenan and Palmer 2001, Palmer et al 2003).